Recipes: Soup

November 17, 2016

Not long ago someone on VWK asked if I had a turkey pho recipe. I was working on it and it took a while for me to figure it out, primarily because I’m not a turkey lover. As you may recall my mentioning over the years, our family abandoned Thanksgiving turkey in the 1980s when my mom admitted that the big bird cooked up dry and that she preferred goose, duck, Cornish game hens, and chicken. For that reason, come each November, I walk right past the turkey in the butcher counter and freezer cases. I’ve trained myself to neglect supermarket ads and deals on natural, heritage, and Butterball turkeys.

Earlier this year I confronted my turkey issues. ChefSteps.com had invited me to partner with them on Shanghai soup dumplings as well as soy milk and tofu video tutorials. They asked me to share other cooking insights and I thought of turkey pho. If you roast turkey around the holidays, how could the remains be turned into pho noodle soup? Maybe turkey pho would be a gateway for people to craft pho at home?

I didn’t include a recipe for turkey pho in The Pho Cookbook because it’s mostly a seasonal thing and plus, we didn’t have enough space in the book. To carryout the project for ChefSteps, I roasted several 11 to 13-pound turkeys to generate carcasses and other leftovers bits that would be used for developing a turkey pho recipe.

One of the most challenging aspects of making good turkey pho (and perhaps another reason why I shied away from it) is how to downplay the strong turkey flavor, which wiped out the subtleties of the charred onion and ginger. Pho is a delicate dance of spices and aromatics. In the end, I dumped the charring and instead dry sauteed the onion and ginger. I also chose to add lots of vegetables to counterbalance the turkey-ness of the turkey broth.

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October 21, 2014

I’ve been keeping a stash of frozen chunks of leftover beef for a couple of months, thinking that I’d use it for a Sichuan-style spicy beef noodle soup. A brow-wiper for cooler months. While driving home from Los Angeles last week, my husband said, “I’d love some Chinese beef noodle soup.” We obviously had a food mind meld. It was exactly cold in Santa Cruz but what the heck. I had the meat. After we settled back into our house, I retrieved the beef – chuck and cross-rib roasts saved from the pho workshops that I taught earlier this year. The pieces were oddball shapes and sizes but who cared? They’d be cut into small chunks anyway.

They thawed overnight in the fridge and I made this Sichuan-style noodle soup the next morning for lunch. It’s a variation on recipe in Fuchsia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice. What I like is the combination of beef with tofu and Sichuan chile bean sauce (dou ban jiang). Similar ingredients are used for solid renditions of mapo tofu but here, the beef is cooked with dried sticks of tofu skin, which resemble nunchucks.

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October 14, 2014

“Take a photo of this salmon,” my mom said. She ran into the freezer in the garage and came back with a frozen whole fish. It was gorgeous. It weighed 7 1/2 pounds (3.5 kg). Weeks earlier, Fedex came to the door and delivered a box of seven whole salmon.

My brother Dan had caught them on a fishing trip in Alaska. I’d seen a Facebook photo of Dan holding one of the salmon and wondered what he was going to do with it. I never thought he’d catch seven total. Bo Gia told me that Dan also caught a 160-pound halibut. Glad he didn’t send that to my mom because it must have been the size of a bathtub. After Dan read this post, he emailed a location shot of himself holding onto his haul. He sent some of these to my mom...

Mom is a precise cook who is never far from a kitchen scale. She reported that all the fish totaled 51 pounds. They’d been gutted so they must originally weighed a lot more. What were her intentions with all that salmon?

Defrosting one (about 30-inches long in the photo below) in the fridge took about 3 days and my mom, who just turned 80, had to shimmy the fish into her side-by-side fridge. Bo Gia didn’t want to chance it by defrosting at room temperature. Once defrosted, my mom hacked at the fish with a cleaver, regular chef’s knife, and a pair of scissors.

I ate three meals with my parents last week and at each one, there was salmon. My mom fixed it in different ways and we never got bored. She’s not worried about using up all seven fish.

Salmon is versatile, she told me, you can do so many things with it. She rattled off a bunch of Viet recipe ideas and got me thinking about assembling this list of your consideration. Here are a few ideas from my mom and me, on this site as well as in my cookbooks.

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October 22, 2013

If you live in the northern hemisphere, it’s hard to escape
pumpkins and various hard fall/winter squashes these days. They’re displayed by the
front doors of grocery stores and end-caps in the produce section. Farmers are
bringing them to our weekly markets and there are better and bigger selections
at Asian grocers. Halloween-carved pumpkins and related holiday decor are front
and center in store ads and people’s lawns. Food magazines are loaded with photos and recipes for squash-centric dishes for Thanksgiving
celebrations. It's a food that screams autumn in color and evokes the coziness of the cooler weather ahead.

In Vietnamese, a generic term for squash is bi and one with red/orange/yellow flesh (e.g.,
pumpkin, kabocha and butternut) is bi do.
We bought a pumpkin to carve for Halloween a couple of weeks ago but instead of
thinking about cutting into it for decoration, I pondered hard squash and
pumpkin recipes.

No, I’m not saying I cook with pumpkins raised for carving.
They don’t taste good. We mistakenly bought a wedge of Cinderella pumpkin from
a Mexican market last month and it looked gorgeous in the oven but tasted blah
on the plate. At the store, I recognized it in its cut form as a decorative
pumpkin but since it was sold under the auspices of being good for cooking, I
tried it out. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.

For cooking, I like kabocha (can’t lose with this Asian
favorite), butternut (sweet, creamy orange flesh), kuri (has a chestnut-like
texture and flavor), and banana (firm flesh, conveniently sold in sections at
supermarkets). I’ve been meaning to try baby cooking pumpkins as they’d
probably work well in recipes.

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May 17, 2013

On Monday, my husband had
dental surgery and for his post-operation, recovery dinner, I made a comforting
(read: easy to chew) tofu, shrimp, and peas stir-fry. The Trader Joe-san medium
tofu came in a 1 1/4-pound (565 g) block and I only needed about a pound. I had
a little block left.

What can you do with a chunk of
leftover tofu? You can save it in the fridge, or in my case last Monday, I
added it to a simple Vietnamese soup with mustard greens and a bit of chicken
thigh sitting in the fridge.